Articles Tagged "Peter C Glover"

It’s not a good time to be ‘green’. In recent months the news undermining the entire green eco-alarmist agenda has been relentlessly unhelpful. Not that you’d know it if your trust is in the mainstream journalistic integrity of the BBC or New York Times.

We could start with the data-driven fact that there’s been no global warming whatsoever for over 16 years. But this would be churlish as even the head of the UN IPCC and Moonbat Guardianistas have been forced to admit that particular game is up. But the devil is in the detail, right? Okay, so let’s check out the detail on key green fronts when it comes to news that may have drifted under your personal news radar. First up, solar activity.

The myths of popular science have a nasty habit of running ahead of the real story by a decade or two. They are difficult to dislodge. It has always been thus. Take the myth that global warming (GW) is today a feature of current global climate activity. Whatever the reason for it, GW hasn’t been happening for 16 years – and not a single computer model predicted it. Then there is the breaking news that the global sea ice area is above normal – and that in the midst of the Antarctic summer. Not exactly been mainstream news has it? But then, as both stories run counter to the prevailing consensus and popular myth, that’s not surprising.

There’s the myth peddled by David Attenborough that polar bears are threatened by extinction when it turns out they are actually thriving; along with stories that that ‘renewable’ energy is an economically viable energy-generating concept; that windmills can provide reliable, regular and cost-effective power demanded by modern grids and energy users; that electric cars make sense at all, given they can only get you from London to Oxford before their batteries expire requiring 16 hours re-charging, and … well, you get the picture. The nexus between green myth and a pro-alarmist mass media committed to falling for, and publicizing, them is plain enough. Which brings us to the big daddy in our age: the myth of still attempting to proclaim a ‘science consensus’ when it comes to anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Spin it as “stalled”. Spin it anyway you want. The cold reality is that global warming just isn’t happening. In truth, it hasn’t been happening for 16 years. And – according to one of the world’s leading contributor to the UN IPCC’s theory on climate, the UK Meteorological Office, it isn’t going to happen over the next five years either. Beyond that, who knows? The Met Office certainly doesn’t – so neither does the UN IPCC.

Just last year, the UK Met Office Hadley Center confidently predicted the average global temperature must rise incrementally by around 0.2oC decade by decade driven by CO2 rises. No small incremental rise. Then on Christmas Eve, something curious happened. The UK Met Office posted a note on its website announcing it was downgrading its assessment. Now we should remember that the Met Office white coats had long derided sceptics who questioned their assessment and their call for immediate government action. All of which helps explain why they tried to bury the news of their ‘revised’ downgrade by publishing it on Christmas Eve.

Unfortunately, though much of the pro-alarmist media duly missed its relevance, an alert blogger and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) appreciated the implications of the story only too well, eventually forcing it onto the front pages in the national media.

John McCarthy once said, “He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense”. Or become politicized tin-shakers pushing absurd “independent economic analysis” it seems

There are some charities to which I would not give a ‘wooden nickel’, and I am a passionate charity giver. Top of the pile: Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF). If they stuck to the task they were originally set up for things would be different. But they haven’t. Both are today highly politicized groups – as Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore confirms – spending large chunks of donations campaigning on issues about which their sum knowledge could fill the back of a postage stamp. Climate science and associated issues, for instance.

The dynamic duo charity campaigners have just published a new report, A study into the economics of gas and offshore wind, conducted for them by the consultancy Cambridge Econometrics for New Economic Thinking.

Where better than the Qatari capital to perform the last rites over the Kyoto Protocol?

It’s uniquely appropriate that November’s UN Climate Summit – the last before the Kyoto Protocol formally expires on December 31st – is taking place in Doha. In the league of the world’s highest per-capita greenhouse gas emitters, Qatar currently ranks at the very top. Where better than the Qatari capital to perform the last rites over the Kyoto Protocol?

Not that that’s how November’s talks will be sold, you understand. In typical UN double-speak, the Climate Summit secretariat will fashion a form of words suggesting that the Kyoto process is alive and well and merely moving into a ‘new phase’. So why do the terms ‘flogging’ and ‘dead horse’ come to mind?

When the 1997 Kyoto Protocol finally came into force in 2005 its commitments were only ever aspirational. Yes, a few states, notably in Europe, played the game by making voluntary commitments towards carbon cutting targets. It made little difference. The increasingly coal-fired fast-industrializing nations including China, India, and Brazil, all contributed to blowing away prospective gains elsewhere.

With global temperatures flat-lining for 15 years, climate alarmist arguments are looking far more fragile than the earth’s (actually robust) eco-system. Of late, climate activists of all ideological shades have thus attempted to posit a “third way” between the “extremes” of interminable left-right, alarmist-sceptic arguments.

Thus the new climate mantra is for a global carbon tax. It is, so we are told, the best way to “incentivise” people to act on the “problem” and provide a “solution”. Step forward Tim Worstall of the UK’s Adam Smith Institute (ASI) and his “third way” contentions.

Now I like Tim Worstall (TW). Tim is a senior fellow at the excellent UK ASI free market think-tank. Generally speaking, Tim contributes a great deal of worthy economic analysis on public policy issues. But in his belief that “climate change is a problem and yes, we have to do something about it” TW has, quite simply, “lost it”.

Here’s a tester for you. Which raft of energy policies gets proven ‘greener’ results? Is it the anti-fossil fuel, cap-and-trade regulatory regimes of socialist Europe? Or is it the path of technological innovation set by the ‘evil’ capitalists in the Kyoto-eschewing Bush White House?

In what has to be the irony of ironies, Europe’s consumption of coal grew by 3.3 percent in 2011. The increase was directly due to the glut of European Trading Scheme (ETS) emission allowances which made coal the most profitable electric power fuel. Over in the United States in 2012, however, coal burning to generate power continued to decline, primarily due to America’s switch to shale gas. Natural gas emits around half the CO2 of coal. U.S. levels of carbon emission are currently plummeting; a feat Europe has no chance of matching, not least as coal use is on the increase. It’s a situation that ought to bring the whole raft of EU market-interfering policies geared to reducing carbon emissions into sharper focus. Policies that can only be characterize by three S’s: sheer synchronized stupidity.

Not that the U.S. coal industry is suffering from the domestic switch to gas, you understand. America’s high-quality coal has had no trouble finding an alternative and lucrative market: Europe. And U.S. coal exports to Europe are only set to increase further.

UK Energy plc is not in the best of hands. Quite honestly, the Muppets could have come up with a more coherent script than that contained in the coalition’s new energy bill.

With investor interest in developing North Sea oil and gas fields running at an all-time high, and parts of the UK onshore and offshore sitting on potentially world class shale gas reserves, it beggars belief that David Cameron’s coalition partners could end up presenting UK energy as a bad news story.

Somehow they managed it.

Faced with a choice of looking across the English Channel to Europe or across the Atlantic to the United States to see how best energy is ‘done’, the new UK draft energy bill has ‘sponsored by Brussels’ stamped all over it. In short, the bill prioritises nuclear power and renewables overlooking what actually drives the economy (and will for decades): fossil fuels, especially shale gas. While nuclear is important in the mix, the UK would benefit greatly by extending the life of existing power stations – were it not for the pointless obsession of meeting EU emission targets. And, in electricity generation terms, wind and solar are just ‘kids’ stuff’: overly-expensive kids’ stuff at that.

I read William Golding’s superb book Lord of the Flies as a kid. It had a lasting impact. Especially about how the thin veneer of civilization, democracy, liberty and prevailing morality can be swept away by a brutish elitist power grab. It’s the same philosophy that resorts to threats to life and limb, property destruction, public smears, vilifying dissent, curtailing free speech and imposing un-democratic regulatory ‘laws’ to get its way.

We tend to associate these hallmarks of totalitarian intolerance, vicious rhetoric and Luddite terrorism with brown-shirted National Socialism in Nazi Germany, red-book toting Communism or radical Islamism; movements alien to Judeo-Christian-rooted Western culture. But all the same kind of rhetoric, threats to dissent and the push to circumvent the normal democratic processes are all much closer to home among the green-shirts of burgeoning eco-fascism.

As a former president of the Royal Society (1703-27) Sir Isaac Newton would be appalled by the de facto rejection of the Society’s 300-year guiding philosophical principle: “never to give their opinion as a Body upon any subject either of Nature or Art that comes before them” (1). Newton understood well that to deal in the “dull certainties” of a politicized consensus is always ruinous to the cause of empirical science. And so it is proving at the once noble Royal Society; its reputation increasingly dashed on the hard to negotiate rocks of climate science.

The evidence for the abandonment of the Society’s core tenet of faith is compellingly presented in Andrew Montford’s recent hard-hitting report, ‘Nullius in Verba (On the Word of No One): The Royal Society and Climate Change’. As leading climate scientist Richard Lindzen(2) observes in the introduction, the report delivers an “unembellished chronology of the perversion not only of the Royal Society but of science itself.” No small accusation given the influence the Royal Society continues to wield with the UK Government – not to mention the UN IPCC.

» How much "Man Made" CO2 Is In The Earth's Atmosphere?
I think ALL of the CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere is from man.
I'm not sure how much "Man Made" CO2 is in the Earth's Atmosphere.
There is .04% CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere and of that "Man" has added an extra 4% (1 part in 62,500)